taskable

1. not comparableengineeringTo which tasks can be assigned.

   a taskable intelligent agent; a taskable sensor

2. UShistoricalnot comparableobsolete(of an enslaved person held on a plantation) Considered to be capable of performing labour, especially field labour.

   1813, Bahama Gazette, 19 December, 1813, cited in Howard Johnson, The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, p. 29, to oblige Planters to plant a certain quantity of Provisions to each taskable Negro

   2 more examples

   1789, record of sale of enslaved people by Thomas Washington, cited in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, Part 1, Chapter 3, p. 198, footnote 85, [The 16-year-old boy has] been taskable these 3 years past.

   1796, court record, Neufville v. Mitchell, 1 Desaussure 480, South Carolina, cited in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall (ed.), Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1929, pp. 277-278, defendant […] states […] many of them were diseased and not taskable;

plural taskables

1. UShistoricalobsoleteOn a plantation exploiting an enslaved labour force, a person considered to be capable of performing labour, especially field labour.

   A listing of an early-nineteenth-century Lowcountry estate revealed but one driver for 104 slaves (or forty-five taskables), and he was both an old man and a mere half-hand.

   1998, Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Part 1, Chapter 4, p. 222

   3 more examples

   Those [slaves] actually in the field were 44 taskables, while the remaining 13½ were employed as cart drivers, nurses, cooks for the negroes, carpenters, gardeners, house servants and stock minders […].

   1829, Basil Hall, chapter 18, in Travels in North America, volume 2, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, page 229

   […] the whole labour of the 122 slaves maintained, does not exceed that which would be obtained from the employment of fifty-seven and a half able bodied labourers, or, in the language of the country, taskables.

   1833, George Richardson Porter, The Tropical Agriculturalist,, London: Smith, Elder, page 40

   1937, Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, Chapel Hill, p. 83, cited in Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Harper, 1941, Chapter 5, p. 128, The very young and the old were usually engaged in the house, while the full “taskables” were more profitably employed in the field.

   Synonyms: taskable hand, working slave